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Course: 2nd grade reading & vocabulary > Unit 1
Lesson 2: Close reading: fiction; Little Red Riding HoodMessages and morals | Reading
Morals are lessons about how to treat other people. Many stories have these lessons embedded in them. Let's learn how to dig them out!
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- Hair and hare have the same pronunciation but different spelling. Is there a name for this?(20 votes)
- They do, and that type of word is called a homophone. Homophones are pronounced the same, but they are spelled and mean different things.(11 votes)
- Does having morals and character mean the same thing?(7 votes)
- Morals are lessons to be learned generally concerning what is right.
Character is a personality or the way a person thinks, or even what said characters morals are (i.e. what the character views as good or bad...)(3 votes)
- How can you tell what the moral is?(5 votes)
- That is an excellent question!
Sometimes at the end of stories, they will say "The moral of this story is/was-" and explain it to you. As you get older you will find "hidden meanings" within stories. Sometimes stories will say the moral within the story, such as "slow and steady wins the race"!
Which doesn't literally mean that you must be slow in a race, it means that you mustn't rush everything. Take your time in life, and enjoy the present. And don't be cocky!
That means don't act like you know everything. You can learn everything, but don't know it all just yet.(4 votes)
- Why do people tell fairy tales?(2 votes)
- People tell fairy tales to teach morals, share a message, or sometimes just for entertainment. For example, some cultures have stories passed down from parent to child that warn not to build villages in certain places. In the story, the reason might be an angry god, but in real life, that land may be an area frequented by natural disasters. The message is don't build a village.
In little red riding hood, the moral is to listen to your parents, but the story is also entertaining for the listener.
Hope this helped🙂(3 votes)
- Why does a story have a moral?(1 vote)
- A story often has a moral to teach us something important about how to behave or treat others. It's like a guide on how to be a good person.(2 votes)
- Do all good stories have a message?(1 vote)
- can i mybe skip for now the videos(1 vote)
- no, you need the videos.(1 vote)
- POV hares: ‘lazy while eating lays’(1 vote)
- If the hare doesn't sleep, how can the story change to the tortoise win again?(1 vote)
- If the hare did not take a nap, how could the tortoise win the game?(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] Hello, readers. Today I'd like to talk to you about The Moral of the Story. Which story? Well, we'll get to that. First, what is a moral? It's a lesson, usually about how you're supposed to treat other people. I think that we can say
that if a story has a moral, it's trying to teach you
how to be a good person. "Aesop's Fables" are full of these. There's the story of "The
Tortoise and the Hare", which I'll tell you very
quickly, if you're unfamiliar. The slow loving tortoise
and the speedy hare have a foot race. And the hare is so sure that
she'll beat the tortoise, that she stops to take
a nap during the race. Meanwhile, the tortoise
slowly and steadily continues onwards, and
crosses the finish line, while the hare is sleeping. That's confetti, as the tortoise
crosses the finish line. The moral of the story is, slow and steady wins the race. You can beat an overconfident person, even if they're more talented than you, if you try really hard and
take it slow but steady. But it's not just old
stories from ancient Greece that have morals. The stories around us are full of lessons about how to treat one another. So, how do you figure out
what the moral of a story is? Good question. One way to do it is to ask
yourself what the problem of the story is, or how
the problem was solved. From the hare's
perspective, the problem in "The Tortoise and the Hare"
is that she lost the race. What could she have done
to avoid that happening? Well, she probably shouldn't
have stopped to take a nap. From the tortoise's perspective,
the problem is solved. He won the race. And how did he do that? By maintaining a slow, steady
pace for the whole race. And then you take that lesson
that the characters learned and you say, "Okay, so
this is true for everyone". It's not just that hares
should make sure not to nap during foot races, it's that
people who are good at stuff shouldn't get so confident
about their skills that they don't try as hard. The hare is really good
at running quickly, so she thinks she doesn't
need to try so hard against a tortoise. Because that is what morals do, they are lessons in stories
that we can apply to our lives. What's true for the hare and
what's true for the tortoise are true for you and me, because those stories were
invented to teach people stories, not just tortoises and hares. You can learn anything. David out.